Todd Bertuzzi is the villain of the day, just like Marty McSorley was before him, just like Dale Hunter was before him and on and on and on. There's a thick history of premeditated assault in the National Hockey League.

Bertuzzi, a member of the Vancouver Canucks, attacked an opponent, Steve Moore of the Colorado Avalanche, from behind in a game Tuesday night and left Moore with a broken neck.

In 2000, McSorley took a stick to the head of an unsuspecting opponent, Donald Brashear, and explained his action by saying, "I got carried away."

In 1993, Hunter, on the wrong end of a 5-1 score in the playoffs, blindsided Pierre Turgeon, a 58-goal scorer, and ended Turgeon's season.

These incidents were committed by men who otherwise would qualify as decent human beings. What could possess them to act in such a manner?

Hockey made them do it.

Neither Brashear nor Turgeon received career-threatening injuries, and Moore is expected to make a full recovery and play again. But that might not be the case next time. What's it going to take for the climate of violence to be eradicated from the NHL?

A career-ending injury?

A permanent paralysis?

A death?

It could happen and, if it does, the league, which not only condones fighting but glorifies it, will be every bit as much to blame as the player who does the damage.

The NHL's insistence on allowing fighting to remain legal within the framework of its rules is ruining what otherwise can be a beautiful game.

If the NHL were on some wild run of success, it might be understandable that it would not want to mess with the status quo. But that's not close to being the case. The NHL is a sick league, where attendance is down, where television ratings are minuscule and where a strike looms that could shut it down for as long as a year.

Why would anyone not want to change that?

Vengeance, another deplorable characteristic that clings to the NHL, was behind Bertuzzi's cowardly and selfish act. Last month, Moore hit a vulnerable Markus Naslund, Vancouver's captain and leading scorer, with a crushing body check that caused a concussion. Some said Moore used his elbow, others insisted he did not. No penalty was called. Vancouver general manager Brian Burke publicly called Moore's hit a "cheap shot."

In the twisted, Old West mentality of the NHL, vengeance was required.

So Bertuzzi dropped his stick, skated after Moore and pulled at his jersey. In hockey parlance, this is an invitation to fight. When Moore rejected the invitation, Bertuzzi, who is 6-foot-3, 245 pounds, hit him in the side of the face with a gloved hand. He then slammed him to the unforgiving ice, face first.

The NHL responded yesterday by suspending Bertuzzi for the remainder of the regular season plus all the playoffs. He will lose about $500,000 in salary, which is not much for a player who signed a contract valued at $28 million in October and who was making more than $3 million a year under the terms of his previous contract.

Bertuzzi also must apply for reinstatement when the NHL starts up again, a part of the penalty that might have to do with the recovery of Moore.

Vancouver, a team with a chance to advance far in the Stanley Cup playoffs, was fined $250,000. Since Bertuzzi was the Canucks' No. 2 scorer, his absence will severely curtail their playoff chances and thus cost them significant money in terms of postseason ticket revenue.

The question is: Has anyone learned a lesson from this?

And the answer is: Probably not.

As long as guns are as handy as they are in American society, people will be killed by guns in enormously greater numbers than they are in other industrialized nation. And as long as fighting is legal in the NHL, there will be fights and there will be outrageous assaults in enormously greater numbers than there are in other sports.

If football had a hockey mentality and felt the need to have enforcers to protect star players, here's what would happen the next time Hines Ward took a crushing hit while airborne and catching a football.

Bill Cowher would send a reserve into the game whose main function would be to get the opponent who hurt Ward. That reserve would either start a fight with the opponent or attempt to injure him.

Such an illogical set of circumstances, of course, makes no sense in football. And it should be the same in hockey.

Football doesn't need goons who act as enforcers. Football has rules that act as enforcers. Hockey, too, should have rules to prevent what happened to Moore.

Hockey lovers will tell you the purest form of the sport is Olympic competition where goons have no role because fighting is not allowed. A player who fights in the Olympics and in college hockey is not sent to the penalty box for two minutes or 10 minutes, he's ejected from the game. And the next game.

What's hard about enacting and strictly enforcing such a rule? The NHL owes it to itself, its fans and, most of all, its players to establish such a rule and bring about the end of fighting in its rinks.